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Comment by ninkendo | Hacker News Reader

The difference between you and the “cancel culture” is that you are a real person who exists, and “cancel culture” is an emergent phenomenon that happens on social media. People complaining about cancel culture is like people complaining about traffic jams. There’s no nefarious person in charge who’s trying to “cancel” things, it’s just lots and lots and lots of people and a tendency to overreact to stuff.

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I think we all know what he means. He means the liberal equivalent to the "socially conservative prude". Which certainly does exist.

(Also this is only tangentially related but why is being prude a bad thing? I had a female friend in high school that would get insulted for being too prude. I don't think people really realize the way these concepts get applied in reality. People are allowed to be prude just as they're allowed to be libertines.)

>There’s no nefarious person in charge who’s trying to “cancel” things, it’s just lots and lots and lots of people and a tendency to overreact to stuff.

There isn't? Are there not people calling for someone to be fired/resign because of some action they did?

It’s not the same people every time. People tend to want to out-outrage one another sometimes and it sometimes it leads certain people to call for boycotting/etc, and then sometimes those movements pick up steam as people try to be “early” to a given outrage cycle.

Nobody’s calling the shots here… nobody went and decided “aim the twitter outrage cannon at Joe Rogan, he ran afoul of the Cancel Culture and must atone.” It’s just a phenomenon that happens due to the tendency of humans on social media to amplify outrage rather than ignore it.

I wouldn’t be so sure: https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/149022042327069900...

The idea that nobody organizes to push around political muscle seems pretty naive, like suggesting that there are no guerilla ads on reddit.

Hence the term «culture»…

It extends far beyond social media.

> People complaining about cancel culture is like people complaining about traffic jams.

This is a great analogy.

It's not an emergent phenomenon that "just happens". It's very strongly pushed by liberal media outlets.

Every "liberal media outlet" I've seen tends to just regurgitate opinions they see on Twitter, so I don't really understand what "pushed" means in your context. It seems more like they're amplifying existing outrage than anything.

Do you actually think channels like CNN get their left leaning bias from reading twitter, rather than their owners? And I suppose fox gets its bias from listening to Joe Rogan?

Who are the liberal owners of CNN? I thought they were all just trying to make money.

Rupert Murdoch, on the other hand, has a history of running news at a loss to push his angle.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/jun/11/rupert-murdoch...

Ted Turner I guess, at least until now?

> Do you actually think channels like CNN get their left leaning bias from reading twitter, rather than their owners?

That's not my claim. I'm claiming that if you actually watch CNN, they tend to literally put a camera to a big computer monitor and show you a bunch of people's tweets. I'm not talking about bias/etc here, I'm talking about how they literally feature tweets as part of their news coverage.

Of the typical stories on CNN that one would qualify as "cancel culture", they typically go something like: "<Celebrity A> said a controversial thing on Twitter! Let's take a look at some of the reactions..." etc etc. Their coverage seems to be focused on "what do the people think of X", all the damned time. Yes, this makes CNN quite useless as a news organization.

Like the war on Christmas?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/style/starbucks-gay-agend...

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